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Camera Obscura by Lavie Tidhar (2011)

Lavie Tidhar’s Camera Obscura, out this week from Angry Robot, is dreadful: penny dreadful.
This steampunk novel both evokes the cheap, serialized sensational fiction of nineteenth century Britain, and engages the aesthetic of the comic book, grandchild of the penny dreadful. While it contains more literary references than any literature/creature mashups flooding the market these days, don’t go looking for high-brow literary illumination through this Camera’s lens: Tidhar writes in the manner Michael Chabon champions in “Trickster in a Suit of Lights,” applauding the speculative writers who keep one foot in the land of “literary” fiction, while invoking “the idea of playfulness, of mockery and inversion.” Tidhar is such a writer, delivering a rollicking adventure with passages of brilliant prose, all the while wryly winking at the reader. At its core, Camera Obscura is a little bit like a Dirty Harry movie, with a young Angela Bassett replacing Clint Eastwood, and 19th century Paris standing in for San Francisco. But that hardly encompasses the dizzying array of elements Tidhar weaves together in a maelstrom of pop culture and recursive fantasy.

I teach English full-time at MacEwan University, research steampunk and speculative literature, and giant monsters. I speak at cons and conferences, and draw and write in my spare time.
I am as avid a FRPG player as one can be with kids, a wife, and a yard.

Upcoming Appearances

If you'd like to have me present at your event, contact me at mikeperschon at shaw dot ca.

2016No appearances scheduled

What people are saying about Mike Perschon, Steampunk Scholar

"...one of Canada's most honourable and brilliant thinkers... He truly is a man of many talents. In the steampunk arena he has proven himself time and again to be open minded, thorough, direct and detailed in his reviews and academic works on various media from art to literature, film and even the obscure. He has been a wonderful panelist and presenter at various gatherings in Canada and the United States. I expect he will be invited to attend many more as people learn more about him. He is a true gentleman with a wonderful sense of humour and wonder. His students are indeed lucky."- Lee Ann Farruga, Steampunk Canada

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